When getting started in a reciprocal link building campaign there are a few things you need to watch out for. Some webmasters who participate in link trading are new to the concept and consequently make some innocent mistakes. When you point these mistakes out they generally are willing to fix them in an effort to improve their site. However, a good percentage of link building campaigns are administered by seasoned veterans who perpetuate these mistakes by purpose.

The mistakes I am referring to are; not having a link from their main page to their link trading section. If there is no way for a human to find the link trading section how would a search engine?

Placing the link building section in a sub domain. While this isn’t too horrible for link trading, it is kind of like getting involved in a 3 way link exchange which is good as long as you knew about it and agreed to it before hand.

Having link pages with more than 20 links on them. You see search engines will just stop processing the links after a certain amount and if the search engines stop looking for links before it gets to your link, why bother trading links with that site?

Those are just a few of the common mistakes some link traders make. Whether the webmaster trading links does these things by purpose or not, you still need to watch out for them.

Yesterday I had one bad faith link trader send me an email accusing me of being a link cheat. What did I do to deserve his ire? I removed his link because I saw that his site had no clear way of navigating to my link from his home page and the page containing my link was on a page with far too many links. I removed his link and he didn’t like it so he sent me an email with a virus attached to it. This person clearly knew that he was being a bad faith link trader and didn’t like being called on it. Oh well what can you do – there are assholes in this world!